The July heat pressed down on the Minnesota farmland like a suffocating blanket, the kind that wraps around your throat and makes you wonder if winter’s bite might not be so bad after all. At 101 degrees, the air shimmered above the fields, creating mirages that danced and twisted like lost souls seeking shelter.
May sat at her office desk, the ancient fan doing little more than pushing the thick air around in lazy circles. Her mind wandered to the previous winter, to those endless nights when the cold had seemed eternal. How strange that now, in this crushing heat, she found herself longing for that bitter chill. At least then, they’d all been together, before everything changed.
Outside, Frank and the boys labored under the merciless sun, their shirts dark with sweat as they worked on the veranda and kitchen addition. The sound of hammers echoed across the property like irregular heartbeats, each strike bringing them closer to completion, though none of them could have known they were also counting down to something far more sinister.
Kathy managed the bar with the efficiency she’d learned from May, while Nana—bless her weathered soul—kept watch over the younger children. But even Nana, with all her years of experience raising hell-raisers, couldn’t have seen what was coming. Nobody could have.
The girls had scattered to their various hideaways, as children do when summer stretches endless before them. Julie and Pam lost themselves in their Barbie fantasies, while Lori, Junice, Bonnie, and Mary claimed the tree fort as their domain. The fort, with its rough-hewn planks and secrets whispered between gaps in the wood, would later become a place of memories they’d rather forget.
“Mary, you’re fat!” Junice’s words cut through the humid air with the thoughtless cruelty of youth. Mary looked down at herself, feeling the truth of those words sink into her bones. She knew she was getting bigger, but not for the reasons any of them suspected. Not yet.
The afternoon unfolded like so many others that summer—the girls splashing in the creek, mud fights and laughter, Bernice the cow joining their aquatic revelry. But beneath the surface of their play, something dark was growing, like storm clouds gathering on a distant horizon.
When the two men in uniform appeared at their door that evening, it felt like the first crack in their family’s foundation. Jim’s draft notice landed like a thunderbolt in their midst, but it wasn’t the lightning that would ultimately tear their world apart. That bolt was still building, waiting to strike from within their own walls.
The truth about Mary’s condition wouldn’t emerge until later that summer, when the heat had baked everything brittle and ready to shatter. But looking back, the signs were there, hidden in plain sight like snakes in tall grass. The way she’d avoid certain parts of the house, the way she’d flinch at sudden movements, the mysterious limp she’d explained away that February day.
Thomas lurked in the shadows of their lives, a darkness wearing familiar skin. He moved through the house like a ghost, leaving destruction in his wake that nobody could see—not until it was too late. Not until Mary’s secret became impossible to hide.
When May finally learned the truth at the doctor’s office, it felt like the world had tilted on its axis. Her baby—her little girl—carrying a child of her own. But it was the revelation of who was responsible that turned that tilt into a complete upending of their world.
Frank’s rage, when he discovered what his son had done to his daughter, was like nothing May had ever witnessed. It wasn’t the hot, explosive anger she’d seen from him before. This was something colder, deeper, more primal. The kind of fury that could freeze hell itself.
That night, as Frank drove Thomas from their property with violence born of betrayal, the summer air carried the sound of breaking—breaking bones, breaking hearts, breaking family. Thomas disappeared down that dirt road with his duffle bag, becoming nothing more than a dark figure against the setting sun, leaving behind a wake of destruction that would ripple through their lives for years to come.
May and Frank drove away from the farm that night with Mary sedated between them, the truck’s headlights cutting through the darkness like search beams seeking answers in a world that suddenly made no sense. Behind them, the farmhouse stood silent, its windows dark with secrets finally spoken, its foundations shaken by truths too heavy to bear.
The summer of 1970 would be remembered not for its oppressive heat or the war that threatened to take Jim away, but for the way it exposed the darkness that had been living under their roof all along. Sometimes the most dangerous monsters aren’t the ones that come from outside—they’re the ones that grow up right beside you, wearing a familiar face and carrying your own blood in their veins.
As they drove through the night, May couldn’t help but think about the winter that had come before, how they’d huddled together against the cold, never suspecting that the real threat to their family’s warmth had been living among them all along. The road ahead disappeared into darkness, much like their future, uncertain and foreboding, but they drove on anyway. Because that’s what the Winters family did—they endured, they survived, they pressed on, even when the path ahead seemed impossible to navigate.
The Minnesota summer night pressed in around their truck, hot and heavy with promises of storms to come. But for now, they drove in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, each carrying their own burden of guilt and grief and anger. The darkness outside was nothing compared to the shadows they carried within.